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The movie business, in many ways, functions in a similar fashion as does professional sports. Like sports, the year of movie releases is broken into seasons. The most important is obviously the summer blockbuster season, then the holiday season, which falls almost right in line with awards season. The months of January and February, on the other hand, are very much the off-season. These two months often represent a landfill of subpar films from which, if we’re lucky, we occasionally mine a few gems. Here, at the end of February, it has become frighteningly apparent that 2013 may be one of the worst early-year droughts to date. Could this be true?
We gathered a group of prominent writers, including C. Robert Cargill, screenwriter of 2012’s Sinister and former critic for Ain’t It Cool News, Will Goss of Film.com, and Jeremy Kirk of FirstShowing.net, to try and get a foothold on the dearth of quality at the multiplex thus far:
Why is it that January and February is such a dumping ground?
Kirk: I’ve always assumed it’s because that’s when people aren’t going to movies, because they are going back to work and school after the holidays. This is the time when people talk about film festivals; Sundance and SxSW.
Cargill: You get to see all the good stuff early, and by Christmas day you’ve seen pretty much everything. And after that it’s all dumping. The only people who are going to see movies at that time are over the age of thirty-five; who have savings accounts and weren’t tapped out by Christmas. That’s why Taken was such a hit and why Clint Eastwood movies tend to do so well in January. They are made for an audience that still has money. They release the Oscar bait movies, which play to that crowd, and then you just get this terrible sprinkling of crap.
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Kirk: Not all movies released in January and February are inherently dumped. But with some of these movies…you can just tell. It’s a shotgun approach; there’s always going to be good movies and there’s always going to be bad movies. And yes, there are more bad movies at the beginning of the year, but I always go into a movie hoping for the best.
How many films at this point this year did you thoroughly enjoy, which would you go to bat for?
Kirk: I would say there are two movies that have come out since the beginning of the year that I think are really solid, and that I would recommend people see. If the rest of the year is crappy, I could see Side Effects and Warm Bodies being in my top ten.
Goss: Side Effects definitely, probably Warm Bodies, and probably Snitch. But that’s three out of, what, fifteen wide releases.
Cargill: Having not seen Side Effects yet, and based on the films I have seen, I wouldn’t go to bat for any of them.
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Is it just us? Are we a subset of critics who are just being too hard on these movies or is it a widespread critical perception?
Goss: Looking at the Tomato Meter for wide releases post-January; Mama is at 60%, Side Effects is at 85%, Warm Bodies is at 78%. Everything else is rotten.
Kirk: I think it’s the audience too. If you look at the box office, there isn’t one movie that has yet passed $100 million, and probably none of them will. Maybe Identity Thief, but that’s the only one that might have a chance. Last year, January/February, we had three movies that broke $100 million. You have to go back to 2008 to find a January/February that didn’t have at least one film that netted $100 million.
Is it always that the studios believe these movies are subpar, or is it just a function of fear and uncertainty?
Cargill: Well, look back at Chronicle last year. Fox had no idea whether it was going to work or not.
Goss: I feel the same way about Rise of the Planet of the Apes, in August of 2011. They didn’t have a clue if they made something good for geeks and/or general audiences.
Cargill: That’s true. They were scrambling to put screenings together in other markets at the last minute after the L.A. critics loved it.
Goss: Chronicle was the same way; they scheduled that screening the same night as The Woman in Black. But again, right up until the week before, I don’t think Fox knew what they had.
Speaking of The Woman in Black, it seems this time of the year has become the “other October.” So many studios releasing horror movies in January, and again quality is the exception and not the rule.
Goss: Ever since White Noise was a hit in 2005, that’s what started it. If you look back at every first weekend, besides expanding titles, the only new release is usually one crappy horror movie.
Cargill: For years, horror movies made $19-20million in a January release. They would take the weekend and that would be it. But The Devil Inside proved that even in our worst dumping ground, you can appeal to a market that won’t see movies, and in fact that they’ll throw money at a terrible movie if it looks like it’s good. I mean, $35 million is sick money for an opening weekend for a film that cost, what, $250,000?
Kirk: Looking at the January horror this year, Texas Chainsaw 3D was an obvious dump, especially considering how many times it got pushed back.
Cargill, your movie Sinister was originally slated for January, no?
Cargill: Yeah. But we really wanted an October release and January, at the time, was piling up with too much horror, much of which was since reshuffled. Mama ended up on the weekend everyone was staking out. And it did quite well as a result.
Goss: Mama was the only PG-13 movie out in January, everything else was rated R. It’s the same reason movies like Escape from Planet Earth keep doing well. There hadn’t been a family film in theaters since Parental Guidance at Christmas. Even that made $70 million just by being there.
Cargill: Some years it’s really bad and some years its good, and most years there’s one bright spot; at the very least you get a Cloverfield.
Kirk: Given how well Cloverfield did, I’m surprised J.J. Abrams didn’t go back to the January slot for other projects.
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But there again, Cloverfield was a gamble for the studio. That was released a year before Paranormal Activity so they weren’t sure this whole found footage thing was going to work.
Cargill: It’s all gambling, and the minute anybody moves then everybody else starts shuffling around. I mean we ended up shifting our date for Sinister, what three weeks out? Everybody recognized what a huge monster hit Taken 2was going to be and knew we’d get swallowed whole.
But clearly horror isn’t the only genre getting dumped.
Kirk: I’m actually shocked that Die Hard, of all franchises, was moved to February. I thought that was such a weird choice.
To me that speaks to both issues we were talking about earlier. It was the only franchise entry to not be released in the summer. They don’t even have confidence in a Die Hard movie this year, and rightfully so, because it was a disaster.
Kirk: This year is really front-loaded with action movies. On top of Gangster Squad, Hansel and Gretel, and Snitch, we got new movies from Schwarzenegger, Stallone, and Willis. Who would have thought Willis’ would be the worst?
Wow, three of the Expendables have new movies out in the first two months of the year.
Kirk: Four if you count Statham.
Goss: Last year, Chronicle did well on Super Bowl weekend, which is usually unheard of because it’s Super Bowl weekend and they don’t go for male-skewing films. You put a Dear John there and it makes a killing. So that suggests that even then they can put something there that people would actually come out and see. Warm Bodies did alright, but that’s arguably more female-skewing; Bullet to the Head clearly didn’t. Identity Thief made a ton of money and nobody goes to see Side Effects, so it’s give and take.
So what’s the consensus here? This year is bad, but not worse?
Goss: I think by default of there not being The Grey and Haywire, this year is worse. Just compared strictly to last year, I haven’t seen anything I liked as much as The Grey. However, that’s more a statement that last year was an anomaly.
Cargill: Yeah. I’ve seen some pretty lean years where everything is garbage. I’ve had years where it’s been six straight weeks of dreck until finally something halfway decent came out on Valentine’s Day.
Kirk: There are little movies here and there that are well-placed in January and February. Steven Soderbergh always does well at the beginning of the year. But I agree that we’ve been more heavily inundated with mediocre to dreadful movies.
Cargill: It’s a really rough year.
Goss: Which isn’t to say rougher than normal, it’s just that normal is pretty rough.
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As we bid adieu to 2012, and shirk off the fears we harbored about the Mayan apocalypse even if we wouldn’t admit it, it’s time to cinematically evaluate the expiring year. Countless film trends rose and fell over the course of these 12 months, but none experienced such severe growing pains as found footage. A popular visual gimmick steadily gaining popularity over the last few years, the subgenre reached a critical mass in 2012 that not only shook our conceptions of this style of filmmaking, but also placed it into a precarious adapt or die situation.
It all started with The Devil Inside... fitting that the genesis was a deeply embedded malicious being. Despite the potential possessed by The Devil Inside's premise, the movie was not only a weak entry into this particular canon of films, but indeed a weak excuse for a film altogether. It so lazily pandered to the popularity of the gimmick to get people into the theaters that it didn’t see the need to bother with trivialities like, say, a third act. Sure, it banked a monumental sum in its opening weekend, based solely on the nature of what type of movie it was, but its subsequent weekend drop-offs were staggering. Clearly, people were tired of being duped.
The Devil Inside, a first-person possession film, being the kickoff of this year’s slate of found footage titles is decidedly apropos. It illustrates the fact that horror is the most common host to which found footage tends to attach itself. There has always seemed to be this natural symbiotic relationship between the two. Horror filmmaker Simon Barrett, writer of You’re Next and A Horrible Way to Die, offered this reasoning for the happy marriage of the motifs: "In found footage horror, the audience is often literally sharing the victim's perspective, and there's an immediate, visceral response.”
“Additionally, found footage needs to look realistic,” added screenwriter C. Robert Cargill (Sinister), “which can mean no lighting crews, makeup, or camera crews, cutting a substantial portion of a budget from a genre that exists primarily with limited budgets.”
The problem here is that by now, we’ve seen dozens of found footage horror films. We’ve been inundated with Paranormal Activity clones, because that is what has proven to be financially lucrative. While initially providing the most suitable coupling for both optimal sensory experience and budgetary constraints, the combo of found footage and horror is increasingly in danger of becoming nothing but white noise. This was the hurdle suddenly facing found footage, and this is where the subgenre most impressively evolved in 2012.
Relatively unknown filmmaker Josh Trank partnered with screenwriter Max Landis, son of the great John Landis, to bring us Chronicle. The film centered on a group of teen boys who are suddenly endowed with super powers. Chronicle then charted the varying moral directions in which those gifts pulled them. It was a fascinating, enthralling movie…told almost entirely through one character’s video camera. Trank and Landis had created the first found footage superhero film, one strong enough to land Trank the gig directing the Fantastic Four reboot. But why did this experiment work so well?
“You care a lot about the villain because you’re seeing his perspective and the terrible things that he’s dealing with,” noted actor A.J. Bowen (The Signal, House of the Devil), it gives you an ability to take on, on a more personal level, the things that are happening in the movie.”
Bowen is an actor most recognized in the horror community, and indeed much of his work has been within that genre, but even he agrees that found footage desperately needed to break out of horror and adapt itself to other genres. "I think the most important thing for us as cinephiles, and as filmmakers, is to be open to change. Maybe found footage isn’t bad, maybe how we use it is bad. Is it a dogma? Is it a set of rules? Art should never have rules, because you’re instantly limiting the potential,” he mused.
This genre flexibility continued in films like Project X and End of Watch. While a certain amount of personal tolerance for salacious content must be weighed when discussing the merits of Project X, the fact is that it was taking a heretofore horror-centric aesthetic and applying it to a raunchy teen comedy. End of Watch, from director David Ayer, further expanded the first-person fictional narrative and adopted it to weave a moving police drama. Given the prevalence and policy of dash-mounted cameras in cop cars, as well as the ubiquitous nature of YouTube, neither of these avenues felt like a stretch. “With the rise of internet culture,” Barrett points out, “it's not like people are videotaping themselves any less these days.”
These films have opened the door for found footage’s continued adaptation. “I think within the next few years we’ll see found footage variants in nearly every acceptable genre,” Cargill said. The good news is, at the very least Chronicle and End of Watch have demonstrated that the crossover need not be simply a desperate ploy for dollars. “Before it seemed like people were doing the best that they could with what they had to fit within,” observed Bowen, “and I never think that art should be confining. I know that it’s not all about art; it’s also about commerce. But there’s a way to do both and I think that now there’s a way to use found footage to enhance the story instead of being reductive with it.”
Even within its progenitor genre, found footage saw evolution and experimentation in 2012. Magnolia Pictures recently distributed a film called V/H/S that had previously garnered a great deal of festival buzz. It is an anthology horror movie, something of a rarity anymore in its own right, in which each vignette is a found footage story. While it may seem that V/H/S is shooting merely for novelty, this merging of two separate horror subgenres may actually help alleviate some of the issues audiences tend to have with found footage in general.
“All of the problems that viewers have with found footage films - the slow first acts, the stylistic tedium, the ‘Why the hell are they still filming this?’ factor - evaporate when the story you're telling is only 15 minutes long,” acknowledged Barrett, who wrote one of the capsule stories for V/H/S and will be writing and directing segments for the upcoming sequel S-VHS. “You have the freedom to jump right into the story and do something really crazy stylistically, because it only has to be even remotely plausible for a few minutes.”
The Devil Inside was the first found footage movie of the year, but 2012 was capped in this regard by Paranormal Activity 4, the most recent installment of the franchise that rejuvenated the trend in the first place. These two films could not be more appropriate bookends for found footage in 2012. The Devil Inside may have been standalone trite, but Paranormal 4 was so lazy and self-derivative as to signal a franchise circling the drain. One of the most striking shared shortcomings of these two films is their obnoxious reliance on a long outdated secondary gimmick in which the filmmakers actually try to convince the audience that the events on the screen are components of a true story.
The Devil Inside actually went so far as to abruptly end the film and advise audience members to log onto a fabricated website for “the rest of the story.” This sort of half-witted deception has been permanently undermined by The Blair Witch Project; once that was debunked, we were immune to the cinema verite charade. “We’re too savvy to it, and we get bored with it really quickly,” Bowen argued. In a year marked by growth and expansion in found footage, The Devil Inside and Paranormal 4 seemed the most outdated relics because they refused to abandon this façade.
Perhaps the conundrum we’re facing with found footage at the moment is how we are defining in the first place. In the past, the term has referred to any film, usually horror, in which the plot progresses via a camera in the hands of one of the characters within the story. How then do we explain the fact that Chronicle’s climax has multiple angles or that, as A.J. Bowen notes, “there’s a montage in [Project X]…how can it be considered found footage?”
In October, Sinister hit theaters. Though shot as a traditional third-person narrative, Sinister may be the most literal example of a found footage movie to date. It is literally about a guy who finds 8mm footage in his attic, and then watches it. In fact, as co-writer C. Robert Cargill admits, “when I registered the idea with the WGA, I did so under the simple name Found Footage. Everyone on the production side loved it.”
This may seem a silly aside, but given that the film was produced by Paranormal Activity maestro Jason Blum, and in light of the extremely transitional phase in which the subgenre finds itself, perhaps Sinister is just the film to get the ball rolling on the subject of total reclassification. If this evolution continues, by this time next year, we made need a more refined term. Though, as Barrett shrewdly professes, “I like ‘found footage’ better than ‘mumblegore.’”
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The allure of a jump scare that perfectly-timed loud noise that sends a horror movie audience jumping is hard to ignore. They're easy but effective — if you want to shake people up nothing works as well as a well placed violin screech or slamming door sound effect. Thankfully the new evil ghost movie Sinister mostly avoids the easy way out by developing its lead character a novelist with a drinking problem and exploring an inventive twist on "found footage" (the guy actually finds footage). It all works quite well… that is until it starts relying on jump scares.
True crime writer Ellison Oswalt (Ethan Hawke) hasn't had a hit book in years but he hopes to change his life around by investigating a set of murders committed in the backyard of a suburban home. To immerse himself in the history Ellison moves his entire family into the house where the committed murders took place (and without telling them their new home's little secret). He immediately falls down the rabbit hole discovering a series of Super 8 movies depicting the first killings and a string of other bizarre murders all captured on gritty film. Ellison loses himself to the movies only flinching when his wife Tracey (Juliet Rylance) begs him to come to bed or his son Trevor (Michael Hall D'Addario) wakes up in a fit of terror from an anxiety ailment. But as he watches and rewatches the snuff films Ellison begins to see a connection between them: a shadowy figure who it turns out might be a supernatural entity.
Great horror rides on its lead and Hawke serves Sinister well. He's ambitious and overly confident of his abilities as he digs deeper and deeper into the history of the Super 8 movies. He makes some poor choices — why writers in movies are continually keeping secrets from their families and drinking way more whiskey than their finances would allow is one of Hollywood's great mysteries — but Hawke is adept at making the act of watching someone watch something interesting. His obsession with the mystery his slowly disintegrating mind is reminiscent of Jack Torrence in The Shining.
But before Sinister gets that involved with its central character it strays into run-of-the-mill haunted house territory. Vincent D'Onofrio pops up for a quick expositional Skype chat to inform Ellison that the dark being in his home movies might be a Pagan deity that eats the souls of children. That would explain all those pesky kid ghosts that keep whispering in the ear of Ellison's Ashley (Clare Foley) and making creepy bumps in the night.
Sinister's most terrifying material comes from the grainy "found footage." When director Scott Derrickson moves back and forth between Ellison and the films the writer illuminated only by the flickering projector it's chilling. But the movie progresses away from that into its own conventional horror movie. Weighed down by explanation and meandering action Sinister loses track of its character angle in favor of the almighty jump scare. It's exhausting — but then again as the nickname suggests they never fail to make one jump.
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A very crowded weekend in store as Liam Neeson in Taken 2, battles a bevy of newcomers including Warner Bros.' Argo, Lionsgate’s Sinister, Sony’s Here Comes the Boom, CBS Film’s Seven Psychopaths and Atlas Distribution’s Atlas Shrugged Part 2.
Twentieth Century Fox’s Taken 2 led the charge last weekend with nearly $50 million and helped the industry enjoy a 50% uptick vs. the comparable weekend in 2011. The PG-13 action crime drama nearly doubled the Friday through Sunday gross of the 2009 original and in the process proved that Liam Neeson (at age 60) is one the most viable (and popular) action stars working today. In its second weekend an expected 50% drop would still give it a shot at repeating at number one with a gross in the $23 to $24 million range and a 10 day total of around $85 million.
Debuting this weekend is Warner Bros.’ Argo, directed by and starring Ben Affleck in the stranger-than-fiction true life story of a ruse designed to free six American hostages hiding out at the Canadian Embassy during the infamous Iranian hostage crisis of the late ‘70’s. The film is already generating huge Oscar buzz along with great reviews and should become a word-of-mouth darling in the coming weeks. Featuring a solid ensemble cast including Bryan Cranston, Alan Arkin, John Goodman and Tate Donovan, projections this weekend range from the high-teens to the low $20 million range and thus it could be a contender for first place if it comes in on the high end of expectations. Argo is definitely a “must see” movie and should be in the top tier of any film buff’s movie-going list.
Third, fourth and fifth place will likely find three films in a major tug-of-war with grosses ranging from $15 to $18 million with Sony Pictures Animation’s Hotel Transylvania in its third weekend going up against newcomers Here Comes the Boom also from Sony and Lionsgate’s horror-entry Sinister.
Boom stars Kevin James as a high school teacher who mixes it up in the world of MMA (Mixed-Marshal Arts) to raise money for his school’s faltering after-school programs and co-stars Salma Hayek and Henry Winkler. Frank Coraci, who also directed numerous Adam Sandler comedies, referees this PG-rated comedy.
On the other side of the genre spectrum is the R-rated horror-thriller Sinister starring Ethan Hawke as a novelist whose family is terrorized by supernatural powers within their new home where a family was once murdered. Scott Derrickson (The Exorcism of Emily Rose) directs from his script co-written with C. Robert Cargill.
Universal’s PG-13 music-themed comedy Pitch Perfect, will enjoy a very strong third weekend with a showing just outside of the top five with a potential gross of $10 to $12 million while Sony’s R-rated time travel hit man movie Looper starring Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Bruce Willis will continue to be a threat in the neighborhood of $8 million. Disney will have Tim Burton’s well-reviewed Frankenweenie making a mark with around $7 million.
Another notable debut this weekend is CBS Film’s critical favorite and Toronto Film Festival Audience Prize winner Seven Psychopaths in 1,480 theaters. The R-rated crime comedy features a cooler-than cool cast that includes Colin Farrell, Sam Rockwell, Woody Harrelson, Christopher Walken, Tom Waits, Abbie Cornish and Olga Kurylenko and is directed by In Bruges helmer Martin McDonagh. An innovative marketing campaign that includes a set of one-sheets with each featuring one of the key cast members and a “Psycho Cats” faux-trailer starring real felines already has generated quite a lot of buzz for the film that will expand into more theaters on October 26. The film is expected earn around $7 to $8 million this weekend and a thus solid per-theater average should await these seven psychopaths.
Fox's The Perks of Being a Wallflower adds 505 theaters and should take in a solid $4 million in this its fourth weekend of release. Finally, opening in 1,012 theaters is Atlas Shrugged, Part 2 with an expected weekend gross of around $3 million for the film based on the epic novel by Ayn Rand.
This should prove to be another solid but very crowded weekend at the multiplex with the high class problem of choosing which of the many appealing films to see will vex moviegoers around the country.

In recent years a powerful, mind-boggling movement has been taking place in film criticism, sweeping into its fold a number of very talented, very intelligent critics. It has been cropping up in reviews, editorials and even the occasional tweet, and gaining a sort of prominence that it does not deserve. Earlier this week, Badass Digest’s Devin Faraci gave it a public face when he notably, and rather wrongly, quipped “…no, a story is not just a series of events that occur in a linear format.” Actually Devin, that’s EXACTLY what a story is. Word for word. A quick perusal of Dictionary.com offers these varied definitions.
1. a narrative, either true or fictitious, in prose or verse, designed to interest, amuse, or instruct the hearer or reader; tale.
2. a fictitious tale, shorter and less elaborate than a novel.
3. such narratives or tales as a branch of literature: song and story.
4. the plot or succession of incidents of a novel, poem, drama, etc.: The characterizations were good, but the story was weak.
5. a narration of an incident or a series of events or an example of these that is or may be narrated, as an anecdote, joke, etc.
6. a narration of the events in the life of a person or the existence of a thing, or such events as a subject for narration: the story of medicine; the story of his life.
7. a report or account of a matter; statement or allegation: The story goes that he rejected the offer.
8. news story.
9. a lie or fabrication: What he said about himself turned out to be a story.
And therein lies the problem with many modern critics: In their chronic overindulgence of their passion – film – they have begun to, like a drug user, require higher doses of whatever it is they are doing in order to get anything substantial out of it. They look at films like Tron: Legacy and Avatar, wish they possessed the complication, originality and sophistication of a Vonnegut novel and then simply declare, “There is no story here; none whatsoever,” no matter how false an allegation it might be.
The problem is that they’ve let themselves get carried away because several of their friends agree with them. “You’re right! There is no story!” And the circle-jerk continues, through editorial and review and conversation, until they begin writing pieces that declare “Everyone can at least agree that it had no story.” No. We can’t. In fact, you’re in a very small, vocal minority who believe that in some cases story doesn’t exist. They’re like the flatworlders, continuously shouting about Earth being a disc rather than a sphere, in spite of the incontrovertible evidence to the contrary. Something can be light on story, exchanging meaningless visuals or random chatter for plot progression; it can have a weak story, with plot twists and occurrences that one can predict moments, if not hours, before they happen; it can even have a bad or terrible story, proving entirely incongruous. But for a movie to have NO STORY, then nothing can happen. Nothing at all. It must be visuals and nothing else. And all the preaching and screaming and hollering from on high will not change that fact.
Tron: Legacy had a story. Sure, it was a beat-for-beat retelling of Joseph Campbell’s myth of the Hero’s Journey, but it is there, every bit of it. And it counts. Complain about that – decry its unoriginality and adherence to a structure that many feel has been done to death – but don’t discount its presence as an actual lack of storytelling. That’s setting the goalpost back. That’s saying, “Oh, no. We’ve seen all that before. You have to do all that AND something new to qualify as a story these days.” Which isn't how it works.
I have no beef with people arguing that something is bad when I think it’s great; that’s the nature of critique. But having to argue the nature of what is or isn’t a story is high school stuff. This is basic, fundamental. Feeling like I have to explain it to anyone makes my head hurt; that I feel I have to explain it to people with thousands of regular readers makes it hurt doubly so.

Comedian Patton Oswalt has a new book coming out next week titled Zombie Spaceship Wasteland (and it is quite good, actually - I think you should buy it). As a result he has been making the rounds online to help promote it. This led to a rather brutal (and funny) editorial foretelling of the death of geek culture at the hands of the internet it once so exalted. This WIRED piece touched a nerve in the community - as no one likes it when the harbinger of death shows up to spoil the party – and a few have taken to rebutting his assertions. You can find the piece here – it is one of this week’s MUST READS. Over here you can find my close friend Harry Knowles’ rebuttal. They’re both right. And they’re both wrong.
Geek culture, as we know it, is getting old. I myself am among the youngest of the old guard, meaning that I’m old enough to have seen Star Wars in a theater, but young enough that it was the first movie I ever saw. The generation that Patton, Harry and I belong to pre-dates the internet. We hail from a time that when you were sent to your room, all you had to do there was entertain yourself with whatever physical media you had there. Kids in my day didn’t have televisions in their rooms. There were no cell phones. The luckiest and richest kids had computers, but they weren’t hooked up to anything to get outside information. No, if you went to your room, you read, you listened to music or you stared at the wall thinking about shit. That was it – those were the choices.
We also hail from an era in which Blockbuster video was just beginning to expand and had yet to reach most shores. Your selection of film watching was limited to what the local family video store (or convenience store – remember that? When 7-11 had 50 video tapes that they rented out?) had on hand supplemented by what HBO was cycling through at the moment. There were 12 Channels, one of them pay cable. If it was on, you watched it. If you didn’t like it, you found something else to do. Like read. Or listen to music. Or stare at the wall. If you were lucky, you had a collection of movies taped off of HBO for the lean times.
Our choices were limited, and thus our experiences shared. If you were a geek in the 80’s, you watched the same movies that I did, read the same books that I did, found enlightenment in the same music as I did. And they were not those things that were all necessarily popular. To many, they were decidedly unpopular. And since many of us were equally as unpopular, we found a certain kinship with being among the few who appreciated such things and took solace with those that appreciated our love of such them.
In 2004, just before the Austin premiere of Shaun of the Dead, I found myself standing in the dark corner of a video store with Simon Pegg. He’d overheard my wife discussing my upcoming birthday and the plans to have a cake decorated with the poster art for Battle Byond the Stars. He turned to me. “Does she mean the Roger Corman film?” I nodded. “Yeah, it’s one of my favorites.” His eyes lit up. It was one of his favorites too. We spent five minutes trading lines and talking about our favorite parts – sharing trivia and delighting that we’d found someone else who appreciated the same, obscure little turkey – all while others looked on without anything to add, because many of them weren’t old enough to remember a time when HBO and the local TV affiliates programmed it as their Sunday Afternoon Matinee seemingly every week.
Patton Oswalt is right; that culture is dying. When kids get sent to their rooms, they have computers, and on those computers they have access to tens of thousands of movies, millions of books, an almost limitless supply of music – but more importantly, all the social contact they can stand. Type something you like into Google and you’ll find a place where people are talking about it. Type it into Youtube and you’ll find videos about it. You are no longer alone, and as a result, people who appreciate the same things as you are no longer nearly as special – and thus you don’t quite appreciate them the same way we did back our day. Instead, the culture is less about finding a connection and trying to stand out in the herd – something that Patton so eloquently points out is becoming harder and harder to do as the limitless stream of information becomes easier and easier to access.
There is a shared culture now – but it is a very different, writhing beast unlike that which we sprung from. But that, true believers, is for next week’s column.
Here’s my review of Zombie Spaceship Wasteland. Seriously, this guy is one hell of a talented writer.

This week, the Austin Film Critics Association convened for its annual gathering to discuss 2010’s AFCA Award nominations. Truly an Austin experience – this eclectic group sat around knocking back beers while naming (and arguing) the merits of the year’s films. Voting doesn’t take place until this weekend, but this initial meeting was just to make vocal arguments and lobby for our favorites. But during the course of the discussion, we ran aground a rather precarious problem: what to do about Hailee Steinfeld.
Some of you might have already read about her, but few have yet had the chance to see what everyone is talking about. This incredible 14-year-old girl turned in a career defining performance in the Coen brothers' new film True Grit reminiscent of Anna Paquin in The Piano and Tatum O’Neal in Paper Moon. She steals the show. It is impossible to walk out of the theater and not talk about how great she is. Stone-faced and cold, she delivers dialog that actresses twice her age would have a hard time nailing. And Paramount is so proud of her work that it's lobbying pretty hard for her to get nominations…for Best Supporting Actress.
Trouble is, there is hardly a frame of the film in which she isn't present. The film, and the book on which it is based, is entirely about her. It is her movie, and while Jeff Bridges is astounding as Rooster Cogburn and both Matt Damon and Josh Brolin prove once again why they are two of the best that Hollywood has to offer, no one outdoes the work of the 14-year-old LEAD.
This is an old trick. The Academy doesn’t like giving Best Actor/Actress awards to kids. But it'll give Best Supporting awards – as was the case with Paquin. Likewise, a studio might ditch a lead in lieu of a favorite to win, and bump that person down to Supporting in hopes of garnering two awards – as was the case with Ethan Hawke in the brilliant Training Day (in which he was the lead, but Denzel Washington was the favorite to win).
So someone in the room mentioned that he didn’t care what the studio wanted; Steinfeld was the lead, so we should nominate her as such. Then came the inevitable question: “Would you vote for her over Natalie Portman?” Silence. You see, no one, I mean no one, gave a better performance this year than Portman did in Black Swan. She will sweep this year and garner the accolades for which she showed the promise when she first emerged on the scene (around the same age as Steinfeld). Keeping the younger actress in the Supporting category means she has a better chance of getting the award – but it also means bumping her down a category for better positioning, and if you’re going to do that, shouldn’t we also consider doing the same thing for someone like Carrie Mulligan, who stole the show in Never Let Me Go, shares the screen with Keira Knightley, but doesn’t stand a chance against Portman?
I know this drum gets banged an awful lot, but the awards themselves are meaningless; the people who get bent out of shape about them really need to learn to let go. The awards process has nothing to do with cinematic immortality; it is entirely about convincing the popcorn-chomping masses to take in a little culture and see those films “everyone is talking about.” And since the studios know that Oscar gold translates into box office dollars and DVD sales, they are the only ones with a real horse in the race. But the nomination process itself means a lot to an actor. Nomination alone means rising to the top of casting lists and being on the tip of the tongue of every producer in town.
Frankly, I think the nomination is much more important than the win for Steinfeld. Being exalted in the actress category and losing is far and away better than being devalued to win. It gets tricky with a critic organization like ours that doesn’t announce our nominations, only winners. But when it comes to the awards organizations themselves, I hope they choose to take Steinfeld’s performance at face value – considering her a lead actress for True Grit.

The line in the sand over the widespread practice of internet piracy and copyright violation has long since been drawn. This isn’t yet another soapbox opining over the damage it causes or the future it is ushering in. Instead this week there is actual, honest to God news in the battle between content providers and file sharers. The Senate Judiciary committee (on which such Senate celebrities as Al Franken, Russ Feingold, Orrin Hatch, Diane Feinstein and Arlen Specter sit -19 Senators in all) voted by a margin of 19-0 to send Senate Bill 3804, known as the "Combating Online Infringement and Counterfeits Act" (or COICA), to the floor for a vote. This thing is going to sail through the Senate and the House of Representatives like a celebrity through airport security. I’m not here to convince you to call your congressmen; in fact, I’m convinced all the calls in the world won’t change his mind, one way or the other.
I think this is a debate we need to have and we need to have publicly, but one side isn’t being completely honest. And unlike the 99 out of 100 other times when Congress sides with big business instead of the people, this time the shady arguments come from the opposition – the freedom fighters, if you will - the one’s fighting for more freedom instead of less of it. Take a look at this. It’s an online petition claiming to have over 250,000 signatures already opposing the bill. My problem with it? The picture in the corner and the language about the bill. It’s a picture of a laptop with a CENSORED logo over a YouTube video of President Obama addressing the United Nations. “OMG! They’re gonna take away my YouTube and censor unpopular speech!” No. They’re not. They can’t. That’s not what the bill does at all.
The problem with it is that every scrap of argument against it is either disingenuous or a slippery slope argument. Is this, as many pundits have suggested, the first step toward the government censoring free speech on this internet? Yes. Yes it is. In the same way that preventing people from buying automatic .50 Caliber machines guns at convenience stores without proper documentation is the first step towards repealing the 2nd Amendment. The question here isn’t whether or not this is what would need to happen to get to a China like repression of information; it is whether our fear of that dystopian, Orwellian future should prevent us from legislating against the folks we all know are on the wrong side of the law.
What does the bill do? It allows the creation of an internet blacklist of websites that the US Government can seize (if they are located within the United States) or require your internet service provider to block (if they are located abroad). On the surface it sounds scary, until you read the fine print. The Bill amends only Chapter 113 of title 18 of the United States Code which deals EXCLUSIVELY with stolen property. To expand and abuse this bill would require a completely different bill addressing a very different part of the US Code. There is absolutely nothing in the bill that allows the government a redress of questionable content. Even child porn can’t be targeted by this bill. Unless it is copyrighted. Because everything in this bill targets two things – internet piracy and counterfeiting operations. The only thing this bill is going to block access to – because let’s face it, anyone doing these things in the US will have moved operations offshore long before it passes – is the Pirate Bay, Chinese websites selling spoofed pharmaceuticals, and websites streaming pirated movies.
And the Bill certainly won’t stop the flow of pirated goods or halt file sharing. But it will make it harder to do. And by restricting access, the government can choke the flow on things most people agree are wrong. Sites like Reddit and 4Chan will still be able to widely disseminate links to pirated goods because, as the bill stipulates, such a site must be “primarily designed” and “has no demonstrable, commercially significant purpose or use other than, or is marketed by its operator, or by a person acting in concert with the operator, to offer” such materials. In other words, the entire primary purpose of the site must be to infringe on copyrights. So YouTube is more than safe from this, counter to what Demand Progress would like you to believe.
The idea of a free and open internet is important, just as the idea of a free and open country is important. But free and open doesn’t mean free from the rule of law. There is no real freedom when your own property can be subject to theft and dissemination without your consent; there can be no freedom when people have no way of redress against those who knowingly do them wrong. That’s not freedom; that’s anarchy. People are going to have a hard enough time arguing against this bill when their arguments are sound, well thought out and air tight. Imagine how hard it is going to be to win fighting from the banks of a slippery slope. When and if someone in Congress decides to take this to another level and censor based upon their dislike of content and I’ll be the first one to line up beside you. But not for this; this one’s pretty clear cut.

This week, Film Threat’s Mark Bell took up the standard to march for Kevin Smith’s idea insisting that critics should have to pay to see films rather than seeing them in advance for free. While there was much kerfuffle over the original tweets about this – and the subsequent verbal lashing Mr. Smith delivered upon me via that very same Twitter account – I haven’t addressed this idea specifically, mostly because I felt it was the silliest part of the rant. But now that a fellow critic has attempted to reinforce Smith’s assertion, I felt it was probably time to tilt at this particular windmill. Here’s Bell’s argument:
Right now, because a critic or film writer can see most things for free, they/we see anything. It’s part of the gig, you see as much as you can. But when I have to pay for a movie? Much more discerning, and I tend to see movies that I actually have an interest in seeing. I’m not going to sleep through a screening (never have anyway), not going to walk out and I’ve got more, personally and financially, invested. It’s more than just my job and privilege, it’s my money on the line too. I think this could lend itself to more rapturous praise, but also more damning criticism (folks love it when their money goes far, hate it when they feel short-changed; this emotion would creep into the reviews but, at the same time, real professional critics who know what they’re doing would find a way to measure their response appropriately).
Now I understand why Smith wouldn’t mind critics paying – as he said recently in a radio interview: he doesn’t need us anymore; we’ve done our job for him already. He has an established audience, and we certainly haven’t helped him recently. Why not let his hardcore fans see it for free – then glow about it – and let the critics cough up a little coin? But this is Bell’s job. He should know better. Here are the three reasons this idea – and Bell and Smith’s notions of what a critic is – is just wrongheaded.
The first and most important is also where I kind of get on the bus with Smith. There are a lot of bad critics in this business. And by that I don’t mean to say that I disagree with their opinion or disagree with their writing; I mean that they don’t love movies. Every once in a blue moon I have someone tell me I’m too lenient on films or that I vary wildly with even many of the guys I review with. Of course, their face always falls when I respond, “Well, I love movies.” Quentin Tarantino once said that there are two types of people, those that love movies and those that love the movies they love. Everyone loves movies, right? Check every dating site out there – virtually every profile contains the same line: Must love movies, music and [fill in a third thing]. But ask yourself, would those people want to watch six movies in a row, uninterrupted? Would they walk into a Hillary Duff romantic comedy with a smile on their face because they hope they might like it? Would the idea of talking about the same movie for two hours straight excite them?
You see, I’m that guy. The first kind. I love movies. And I walk into every movie, no matter who made it or what it is about, ready to love it; after all, nobody in their right mind drops $10 and sits down with their arms folded ready to write scathing lines disemboweling it. But I’m not like the majority in this business. Some people love the movies they love. As Bell said: “But when I have to pay for a movie? Much more discerning, and I tend to see movies that I actually have an interest in seeing.” At the end of the year I pay to see some of the worst movies out there as well as pay to rent or stream the reputedly worst movies of the year in order to write my worst-of-the-year list. Seventy-five percent of the crap I watch doesn’t even make it, but I enjoy the experience for what it is nonetheless ... Because I LOVE this stuff.
If you’ll watch anything put in front of you “because it is your job” but won’t do so with your own free time and money, or if you have to cough up your own money in order to experience the visceral nature of being “personally and financially invested”, perhaps you are in the wrong career. There are a number of fantastic careers in the film industry for which your talents would be better suited – but this is likely not one of them. And that’s no reason to shut out the ones that are cut out for this.
Secondly, a critic’s job isn’t just to tell people whether or not they should see a movie; it's to help people enjoy their movies more. I’m not a marketing stooge; most of my colleagues aren’t marketing stooges. Sure, marketing stooges exist in this industry, and we make fun of them, but this gig isn’t us just typing the words “I liked it.” An impact on the box office isn’t our job. Our job is telling you about the film in such a way that you not only decide whether or not to see it but take away something that enriches your experience of watching the movie – whether it be something funny you might not have noticed about the quality of film or acting, or an idea or theme the director is playing around with that the audience might not get right away. Many people even read the reviews after the fact to help them understand a film better or see if anyone else saw it the same way they did. Removing that kind of review from a lot of films – and doing away with press screenings would do just that – takes away from the enjoyment many people get out of the experience. Not everyone gets to pal around with movie geniuses every day or play stickball with Kevin Smith; some people need to read the conversation rather than have it.
Finally, the core idea is a joke because critics don’t pay for movies – our papers or sites do. We already have to pay upfront to see many movies now that the studios felt weren’t good enough to show to critics, and we just expense our editors for them. But what that means is that an outlet will only want to pay for something that pays them back – which means paying to see the movies everyone wants to read about rather than paying for the ones they don’t. And that means big-money corporate films with $50 million in marketing will always trump coverage of the $50,000 B&amp;W indie that is 10 times as good but needs 100 times the help getting people to see it.
Critics will never be cut out of the screening process. Period. And if magically press screenings were finally done away with, one studio would resurrect it to get scads of cheap publicity, dominating the vacuum left behind and causing other studios to wonder aloud “Why should they get all of the coverage?” – you know, before they start up screening for the press again as well. Filmmakers and studios don’t have to show us their films, but not showing us says more about how they feel about their films than it does what they think about critics.

Earlier this week, Pajiba’s Dustin Rowles delivered a scathing critique of those of you who paid to see Jackass 3D — and with a $50M opening weekend, odds are it was a lot of you. While he understood why someone might be interested in it, he argued that you have somehow surrendered the moral high ground if you did so. He went on to argue this:
Unless you can make the distinction between a movie like Jackass 3D and Meet the Fockers or Norbit — and I can’t; I’ve wracked my brain trying to make an honest distinction — then you have lost the moral high ground. It’s hard to complain about cultural erosion if you spent $10 to watch a man launch a turd out of his ass. You can criticize Katherine Heigl movies, and Rob Schneider movies, and Adam Sandler movies, but that criticism will feel somehow empty after you applaud a pig rooting around in an obese man’s anus for an apple.
Now, while I did not pay to see Jackass 3D last weekend, I sure told a lot of people that they should. And I think Dustin really missed the boat when he made his comparison. First and foremost, he dug deep and pulled out some truly terrible movies to compare this to. Difference No. 1? The critics enjoyed it. It received a 66% positive (FRESH) rating from critics and an 83% positive rating from the audiences on Rottentomatoes.com, and a B+ CinemaScore. None of the films to which Dustin is alluding has fared anywhere near as well.
Difference No. 2? Jackass knows it is lowbrow and instead attempts to achieve a balance between the base audience to which it is playing and a certain level of artistic originality in the way it is executed. Jackass knows what it is and instead tries to nail the slapstick, Three Stooges ideal with every stunt. Half the fun of the recent endeavor was watching these guys, who have long done the dumbest things known to man, step back, peer over the edge and say, “Oh, hell no,” while simultaneously knowing they have to do it if they want to cover the mortgage on their homes. All of the films Rowles mentioned are products of the Hollywood lowest-common-denominator machine; they’re films that revel in how much smarter they think they are than the audience, rather than placing themselves gleefully beneath them like the boys of Jackass.
I don’t think anyone out there thinks the massive opening says anything about what America wants to see. If anyone is rushing out to assemble a Jackass team of their own, they are about to learn a hard lesson. The success of this film doesn’t speak to where entertainment is going; it speaks to the strength of the brand. Jackass has consistently entertained people enough to come out and see it, and the way the 3-D gimmick was executed in the film delivered on the word of mouth to back it up. Does it mean a Part 4? Possibly. It definitely means a Part 3.5. And is that so wrong? What it definitely does NOT mean is more Katherine Heigl movies (both Life as We Know It and Killers disappointed). One of these things is NOT like the other.
I think Dustin just felt smarter than the movie and wanted to make us feel dumber for liking it. There’s nothing wrong with dumb movies, as long as you like them for being dumb and don’t fool yourself into thinking that they are anything but. Nobody thinks Jackass is Oscar gold, but many of us think it is a fine thing to spend $12 on.